Hunting is a popular pastime, with nearly 14 million people hunting annually in the United States. These hunters spend nearly $34 billion annually on various hunting equipment. Many waterfowl hunters in particular purchase decoys, as these are seen as a key piece of equipment to enable the hunter to attract waterfowl to the area being hunted. In recent years, decoys have become ever more sophisticated as a means of better attracting waterfowl to the hunter's desired hunting location.
Waterfowl decoys are designed to float on the top of the water. A well-known problem with decoys is the need to keep the decoy from floating away from the desired area due to wind or currents, which makes the decoys less effective in bringing waterfowl to the desired area, and more difficult for the hunter to recover after the hunt. To hold decoys in place, waterfowl hunters typically tie a length of line to the keel portion of the decoy, with a weight attached at the opposite end of the line. The length of the line is critical, however, since if the line is shorter than the depth of water into which the decoy is placed, then the decoy will float away, and if the line is too long for the depth of water into which the decoy is placed, then the decoys will move about excessively on the water, may become entangled with other decoys, and may not present the desired decoy “spread” intended by the hunter. For this reason, hunters are often required to carry sets of line of varying length in order to accommodate the depths of water they encounter at a desired hunting location. Since waterfowl hunters generally deploy a number of decoys, maintaining a full set of lines in all of the possible required lengths for each decoy is burdensome and expensive.
The art includes a number of efforts to construct waterfowl decoys with variable-length weighted lines in order to alleviate this problem. None of these attempts, however, have proven acceptable and thus have not gained widespread commercial acceptance. An improved method of providing a weighted line of varying length for waterfowl decoys is therefore desired.